It is official: this is the book that made me an unwavering fan of Lestat. While the previous Vampire Chronicle, Queen of the Damned<m features an array of characters and scenarios, there wasn’t as much a focus on the Brat Prince. In this, the fourth book in the series, Anne Rice has almost inverted that: Lestat de Lioncourt is front and center through all of it; the reader gets to, finally, see him fall, and seek redemption.

The concept is pretty simple: Lestat, after over two centuries of being a vampire, has grown weary of it all. He’s tired of the purgatory, the repetition; he longs to feel human pleasures again. He comes across a mysterious spirit — a body thief — that allows him to trade places with a human man.

By combining her trademark erotic and horrific tendencies with a hilarious and enthralling fish-out-of-water scenario (Lestat was human in the 1700s, mind you, and is attempting human life once more in the early 1990s), Anne Rice created a truly addictive read — perhaps the closest she’s come to a true crime thriller . . . sort of. This book is jam-packed with cool ideas and a lot of intriguing theology talk. I know the next novel in the series goes deep in that direction, and I can’t wait to jump on it.